Holy Summer, Batman

So yeah.  We’ve never really had summer in the traditional sense before this.  Summer with school aged kids.  Summer with road trips.  Summer with swim lessons.  Summer with a garden and a yard and oh, yikes, a drought.  It’s been awesome.  It’s been full.  It’s been sun-soaked and outdoors and lots of watermelon and learning to ride bikes and all the things summer is supposed to be.

We had an awesome trip to Colorado to visit my parents.  It involved our first ever family camping trip (on the night between our two days of road trip) and then a super fun 9 days at Gramma and Papa’s house.

We didn’t get to see the amazing mountains as much as we wanted (due to their being on fire) but we did get up to Estes one day and rode the tram and hiked and climbed rocks and had a blast.

We also went up in the canyon and waded in the mountain river. This is a tradition for my mom and I, so it was pretty awesome to do it with the kids.

More camping on the way home, and then we flipped right around and headed to Madison for the Fourth of July.  After all these years, we finally saw the fireworks over the river for the first time.  Super fun.  Super hot super fun.

(I know I’m trying to cover a whole summer in one post, here, but I just have to stop to say that watching fireworks with Scott was an experience.  He oohed and aaahed LOUDLY at EVERY explosion.  He also began to make comments on them, like “Now that’s what I call a firework!” and “Ka-boom!  Classic firework.”  It kind of made the show for me.)

As soon as we got home from Madison, we started two weeks of swim lessons.  Just Ellie and Scott this year, though it was such a good experience that I will definitely put Lu in next year, too.

Throw in another trip to Madison, a bunch of swimming with friends, a couple of good movies, blasting through the summer reading program at the library, a jungle garden full of cucumbers and tomatoes, and yeah.  It was a good summer.  Just one that didn’t leave me much energy by night to blog about it.  School starts in two weeks.  I think we’re going to be ready for it.